El Remate

We used my hotel rule of checking out at the last possible minute to fully utilize their pool and finish up our laundry before heading out. We made it  less than an hour to El Remate for a look around since it was way too hot to start hiking in Tikal.

We pulled off onto a dirt road and started driving around the lake… and we found what we were looking for almost immediately. Big blue lake, long swimming pier, and a white horse just hanging out and cooling off in the water. Errrrrrrt. We didn’t really know what we were looking for here, but sometimes you just know when you’re there. We were there.

There are a smattering of hostels and hotels and eco-lodges here and we happened to pull over right in front of something you might call an eco-lodge. Primitive in all the right ways. We weren’t aware of any camping (and it was still way too hot again,) so we forked over the $20 USD for a room with a fan and we were done for the day.

Put on the trunks and head for the water. I’m not sure how we killed an entire afternoon and evening out by the water, but we managed to do it. We met some really cool folks too.

Despite still not really knowing how to swim, Bode was keen on jumping off the dock all day and we were keen on staying cool. He’s getting better every day.

Part of our afternoon involved playing with everyone’s cameras. Elana’s had some sort of feature where you could make it have different effects like a fish-eye, or let you put silly costumes on people… and it was waterproof. Anyway, we thought all these silly camera features were ridiculous and couldn’t imagine why anyone would want all that stuff on their camera. We played with it for hours while we dismissed the entire concept.